Archive for the ‘jay jaffe’ tag

Jose Fernandez is (arguably) the biggest name to go down to TJ surgery yet. Photo via thestar.com

Its the biggest story in baseball so far in 2014. We’ve had nearly 20 MLB pitchers get diagnosed with torn elbow ligaments so far this calendar year. All of them have or are set to undergo “Tommy John” surgery (also known as ulnar collateral ligament/UCL replacement surgery). That’s nearly as many as who got the surgery ALL of 2013 and we’re just 6 weeks into the season. There’s an alarming trend upwards over just the past few seasons of pitchers getting this surgery. There’s been plenty more minor leaguers (two Nats farmhands in Erik Davis and Danny Rosenbaum have already gotten it in 2014) and already a couple of very high-profile draft prospects as well (including as discussed in this space potential 1st rounders Jeff Hoffman and Erick Fedde just in the last week).

Lots of people are talking about this story, especially some heavy-weights in the baseball world. A sampling:

Tom Verducci (he of the “Verducci effect”) proposed a solution in a column this week after the Jose Fernandez announcement. His idea? Lowering the mound across all levels of the sport. He draws this conclusion after hosting a very interesting round-table on MLB Network.

Jayson Stark teamed up with ESPN injury analyst Stephania Bell and former player Alex Cora to discuss the rise in arm injuries in this ESPN.com video, and they follow Andrews’ theory of year-round pitching.

Chris O’Leary, king of the Inverted-W (whether you believe his theories or not, I’ve included this link here) has his own theories as discussed here. He doesn’t really have much in the way of explanation, just more whining about how every pitcher’s mechanics has something you can complain about.

So what the heck is going on?? Lets talk about some theories. I’ll highlight them in Blue.

The new “hot theory” is essentially this: Over-throwing at Showcase events, which have become crucial scouting events for kids raised in the United States, are to blame. Thanks to the rise in travel leagues and select teams, scouts spend less time sitting at high school games and more time at these all-star events. To prescribers of this theory, it isn’t so much about the amount of innings or pitches that kids throw … its the nature of the “showcase” events and the high pressure situations that those events put kids under. Kids are throwing year-round, and they’re ramping up max-effort pitches at national competitions multiple times per year, and in some cases out of “season.” This leads to serious damage to kids’ arms done as 16 and 17 yr olds, which then manifests itself over the years and results in blown ligaments in pro ball.

Do you buy this explanation? It certainly makes sense to me, but how do you prove this? And, it doesn’t explain the similar rise in elbow injuries to non-American pitchers.

Is it less about the showcase events and more about the Larger Increase in Youth pitched innings thanks to the rise in Travel Leagues? This theory also makes some sense to me: thirty years ago kids played an 18-20 game spring Little League season, at best would pitch half those games and that was it. Maybe they played in the fall too, but there were specific innings limits in place that protected kids. Now instead of playing limited spring and fall seasons, kids are playing AAU travel teams that play 40-50 games a summer, plus weekend tournaments, plus (eventually) the above showcase events as they get closer to matriculation. This theory certainly is supported by a startling rise in youth arm injuries, as noted in this 2010 study by the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons.

But, if its “bad” to play more baseball … then shouldn’t we be seeing even MORE injuries from players who grew up in third-world baseball hot beds like the Dominican Republic or Venezuela, where by all accounts kids play baseball from sun-up to sun-down 12 months out of the year in tropical climates?

Interestingly, of the list of 19 MLB players so far who have been diagnosed with a torn UCL (see next section), there’s 4 non-American developed pitchers (Rondo, Nova, Figueora, Cisnero). 4 of 19 = 21%, whereas about 22% of MLB pitchers are non-American developed (my 22% figure comes from this quick study that I did; I grabbed every active MLB pitcher as of early May 2014 and did a quick-and-dirty player upbringing analysis to determine that about 78% of players “grew up” in the current American system of player development). It is small sample size … but the percentage of american versus foreign developed players are so far exactly in line with the total percentage of each type of player in the larger pool of MLB pitchers. This doesn’t seem to support either of the two above theories.

We’ve all heard horror stories about pitch counts and pitcher abuse at high school events in Japan (this came to light over the winter as we looked at Masahiro Tanaka and learned about these Japanese showcase events; this article here at thebiglead.com talks about one Japanese prospect’s 772 pitches thrown over 9 days, and Jeff Passan talked about Tanaka’s own pitch count abuse stories and his average pitch counts as a Japanese-league pro). Unfortunately there’s not a ton of data available about this TJ theory and Japanese pitchers. I can find a couple of instances of Asian pitchers getting the surgery (Kyuji Fujikawa in 2012 being the most recent example), but not enough to establish any trends.

But lets state it this way: you can’t have things both ways. Both these stereotypes about player upbringing cannot be true:

Latin American poor youth plays baseball from sun up to sun down 12 months a year, building arm strength constantly, therefore his arm is “stronger” and he’s less suceptible to injury

American little leaguer plays limited schedules (18 games in the spring, perhaps fewer in the fall), has closely monitored pitch counts, therefore does not abuse his arm as a youth and thus his arm is “stronger” later in life as a result.

Of these 19 pitchers, they are evenly split between being starters (10) and relievers (9). So that doesn’t seem to lend itself to any Starter vs Reliever usage conclusion.

How about Pitching Mechanics? We’ve all heard ad-naseum about the “Inverted W” and people talking about pronation and timing and elbow lift and etc etc. Here’s a quick attempt to analyize the mechanics of each of these 19 guys (all photos grabbed as thumbnails from google images for the purposes of demonstration; no copyright infringement intended).

Quick and Dirty Mechanics analysis (images in same order as list of pitchers above, which is choronological in order of diagnosis in 2014):

But I’ll immediately add a caveat to these classifications; at various stop-points in a guy’s delivery, he may exhibit “good” or “bad” trends. Maybe some of these “sideways-M” guys are actually “inverted-W” guys. Maybe some of these inverted-W guys are ok and the stills make their mechanics seem worse than they are.

Nonetheless; there’s no trend among the 19 guys in terms of their mechanics. In some cases they’re “bad” (Griffin and Gearrin’s look awful) but in some cases excellent (nobody should look at Moore’s mechanics and say they’re anything but clean, nor with Parnell or Corbin). These pitchers are overhanders, 3/4-slot guys and even side-armers/submarine guys (Gearrin and Moylan). These guys include hard throwers (Rondon had the 3rd highest velocity of *any* pitcher in 2013) and softer-throwing guys (Medlen had one of the lowest fastball velocities in the majors in 2013). There’s starters and relievers almost equally represented in this list.

Conclusion; there’s no conclusions to draw from pitching mechanics analysis. I think all attempts to look at guys’ mechanics and make judgements are useless. I think (as does Keith Law and other pundits in the field) that the “Inverted W” is nonesense and that “research” posted online by concerned-fathers-turned-self-appointed-mechanics-experts is not exactly trustworthy. The fact of the matter is this: throwing a baseball over and over is hard on the body. Throwing a ball is an unnatural motion, and throwing a ball at max-effort will eventually lead to pitching injuries, no matter what your mechanics. They can be “good” or “bad” according to someone’s pet theory on bio-mechanics and it has nothing to do about whether a pitcher is going to throw 10 seasons without injury or have two tommy johns before they’re 25.

Some historical context for pitching mechanics arguments: the pitcher who has the 2nd most innings thrown in the non-knuckleballer modern era (behind Nolan Ryan) was Don Sutton. Sutton displayed absolutely *classic* inverted-W mechanics, never hit the D/L in his career and threw nearly 5,300 innings over the course of 23 seasons. Walter Johnson‘s mechanics were awful; he slung the ball sideways as he literally pushed backwards away from the hitter at the end of his delivery. If someone saw Johnson’s mechanics today they’d talk about how over-compensated he was on his shoulder and how he lost velocity thanks to landing stiff and having zero follow through. Johnson only threw 5,900 innings in his pro career; yeah those mechanics really held him back. Nolan Ryan was a freak of nature, throwing at that velocity for as long as he did. The point? You just don’t know.

Maybe there’s something to the “showcase abuse” theory for some players. Maybe there’s something to the travel-ball overuse theory for some kids. But I think the answer may be a bit more simple. We all know there’s been a rise in the average MPH of fastballs in the majors, both on starters and especially with relievers. My theory is simply this: kids who “can” throw upper 90s spend all their time trying to throw upper 90s/max effort fastballs 100% of the time, and human arms just cannot withstand that kind of abuse over and over. In prior generations, kids who “could” throw that hard wouldn’t, or would rarely try to throw that hard, and thus suffered fewer elbow injuries.

Side note: I also firmly believe that we’re “victims of our own success” to a certain extent with respect to modern medicine; 30 years ago would someone have just “blown out their arm” instead of being diagnosed specifically with a “torn ulnar collateral ligament?” Would some kid in the low minors who hurt his harm even bother to get an MRI? How much of the rise in these injuries is simply the fact that we’re better at diagnosing injuries in the modern sports world?

Why are these kids trying to throw so hard these days? Because velocity is king, and that’s what scouts look for. A kid who “only” throws mid 80s as a 17-yr old is dismissed, while the kid who can throw mid 90s at the same age is fawned over. Guys like Greg Maddox, Mark Buehrle, and Tom Glavine probably don’t even get drafted in the modern baseball climate thanks to the over-focus on pure velocity.

You can talk about upbringing and showcase events and pitch counts and mechanics all you want, but I think it comes down to Pitcher over-exertion thanks to the rising trend of fastball velocityand the human nature urge of prospects and farm-hands to show more and more velocity so they can advance their careers.

What do you guys think? Do you dismiss the “inverted-W” arguments like I do? Do you think its all about showcase events?

Sabathia remains the best chance for another 300-game winner .. Photo wiki/flickr chris.ptacek

Welcome to the latest installment of the “Will we ever see another 300-game winner” post.

(Aside; yes I know the limitations of the “win” statistic. However, nobody looks at a 20-game winner on the season or a 300-game winner for his career and excuses it as a statistical aberration; the pitcher win will continue to be important to players and in the lexicon of the game for years to come, despite Brian Terry‘s #killthewin campaigns).

Of the 24 pitchers in the game’s history to have reached the 300-game plateau, 4 of them have done it in the last decade (they being Randy Johnson, Roger Clemens, Greg Maddux, and Tom Glavine). However, there exists a distinct belief in the game that we may not see another 300-game winner for some time, thanks to pitch count obsessions, innings limits, 5-man rotations, NL small-ball managing, match-up relievers and generally a huge rise in bullpen usage over the last 20 years.

In the past year, I’ve collected some topical reading related to this post:

Lastly, here’s an analysis of CC Sabathia‘s decline in 2013 from Alex Keinholz on BeyondtheBoxScore from July 2013

When we first broached this topic (in April 2009), Sabathia was still the best bet (outside of Randy Johnson, who sat at 296 before the 2009 season began), but it didn’t look that good for anyone else to reach the plateau, and a couple of the names we guessed as having an outside shot (Ervin Santana and Scott Kazmir) seem like ridiculous choices now. When we most recently broached this topic (at the end of the 2012 season), we explained some statistical models we and others were using to try to predict who may have the next best shot at reaching the mark. We concluded that Sabathia and Hernandez were both pretty good guesses at the time to reach the plateau.

How are things looking now?

I maintain a spreadsheet (uploaded to google and/or available via the links to the right of this page) that ranks candidates using a couple of formulas inspired by Jay Jaffe (see 2012’s post for the full thought process behind them). Basically Jaffe’s prediction models assume that the pitcher can win X games per year after a set age (in Jaffe’s case, his simple formula assumes pitchers win 15 games/year until their age 42 season, a relatively optimistic projection and hence why he self-titles it using the words “blindingly optimistic”). I’ve used a couple other methods to rank pitchers (calculating average number of wins past the age of 18 or 23, but since some guys get drafted out of HS and debut at 20 or 21 these projections end up looking ridiculous), in order to find candididates to put into the discussion. I also don’t really even consider a guy until he gets to 50 career wins, so there’s no wild speculation about someone like Shelby Miller (15 wins in his age 22 season) or Jose Fernandez (12 wins in his age 20 season).

So, without further ado, here’s a list of starters right now who are in the conversation of possibly reaching 300 wins in their career and my % chance opinion of getting there.

pitcher

age

wins

% Chance of making 300 wins

CC Sabathia

32

205

75%

Clayton Kershaw

25

77

50%

Felix Hernandez

27

110

10%

Justin Verlander

30

137

10%

Madison Bumgarner

24

49

5%

Trevor Cahill

25

61

5%

Zack Greinke

29

106

5%

Mark Buehrle

34

186

1%

Rick Porcello

24

61

0%

Yovani Gallardo

27

81

0%

Matt Cain

28

93

0%

Thoughts per starter:

CC Sabathia remains the pitcher with the best chance of reaching 300 wins, but i’ve downgraded his probability from last year’s 90% to just 75% right now. Why? Well read no further than the link about his 2013 decline, where his FB velocity dropped, his ERA rose and he posted a sub 100 ERA+ value for the first time in his career. He still won 14 games, but his win totals have declined four years in a row. On the plus side, he’s a workhorse pitching for a team that historically has a great offense, which enables him to get wins despite an inflated ERA (he had 4 or more runs of support in 20 of his 32 starts in 2013 … Stephen Strasburg just started crying). It still seems entirely plausible he can average at least 10-12 wins for the next 7 seasons and hit the milestone before hanging them up.

Clayton Kershaw improves his probability of hitting the plateau from last year to this year based on two factors: First, he has clearly stepped up and is now the pre-eminent starter in the game and seems set to continue to post 16-20 win seasons for the extended future. Secondly, the Dodgers now spend money like no other, ensuring a winning team that gets Kershaw victories even if he’s not pitching his best. He was “only” 16-9 in 2013; I would expect him to put up more wins each season in the next few years, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see him with 160 career wins before he’s 30.

Felix Hernandez‘s chances have plummetted; going from 75% last year to just 10%. Why such a precipitous drop? Two factors; first he took a noted step back in FB velocity this year, to the point where pundits were questioning his arm strength. Secondly, he signed a massive deal to stay in Seattle … and Seattle right now is not a winner. It has a completely dysfunctional ownership and management group and seemingly has no idea how to put together a baseball team. They’re competing in a division of teams with better management willing to spend more money, and these factors are going to continue to have Hernandez put up the 13-14 win seasons he has been doing for the last four years. He’s already 27: if he’s doesn’t have back to back 20 win seasons his chances are kaput.

Justin Verlander, like Hernandez and Sabathia, also had a curious drop in performance in 2013, leading me to drop his 300-game chances from one in three to one in ten. At age 30 he has logged just 137 wins and has gone from 24 to 17 to 13 in the last three seasons. If he can right the ship and get back to the 18-20 game win plateau, he can get his 300-game mojo back, but at age 30 he’s less than halfway there, so chances are looking pretty slim.

Madison Bumgarner appears here mostly because of his advanced win totals at such a young age; he already has 49 career wins before his 24th birthday. He’s averaging 14 wins a season so far, and with a 14 win average in every season between now and his age 40 year he’d hit his mark. But I have his chances right now at only 5%; its just too early to really tell if Bumgerner will have the endurance and continued success to get there. Plus, is Bumgarner an elite starter or more in the mold of a Mark Buehrle (i.e., a durable lefty who grinds out 13-14 win seasons for a decade)?

Trevor Cahill is in nearly the same boat as Bumgarner, except that I don’t think he’s quite as good. In fact, Cahill seems like he’s bound for Mark Buehrle territory (see below); an innings eating guy who is always right around the 13-12 mark each season. If he does this for the next 15 years, he may get close. I give him a slight chance.

Zack Greinke has gone from not even being considered to having a 5% chance. Why? Well he’s signed a huge long term deal with a very good team AND he now pitches in both the NL and in a pitcher’s park. In 2013 he put up a very quiet 15-4 record and I think with his stuff and his health he could put up multiple 16-18 win seasons. That’d get him to the mid 200s by the time he’s nearing 40 … maybe enough to have him go for it while pitching into his early 40s. Or maybe not; by the time he’s 40 he’ll likely have nearly $250M in career earnings and may just buy a ranch somewhere.

Mark Buehrle‘s career 162 game average W/L record (14-11) is identical to Bumgarner’s. In his last 5 season’s he’s won 13 games four times and 12 games once. I have given him a 1% chance of hitting 300 on the off-chance that he pitches well into his mid 40s, continues to put up 4th starter figures and finishes with a career record of something like 302-285. He doesn’t miss many starts, so perhaps he’s that durable.

The last three guys mentioned (Rick Porcello, Yovani Gallardo and Matt Cain) are all given 0% chances at this point but are listed thanks to their advanced win totals by their mid 20s. Cain’s sudden drop off in 2013 (a common theme in this list) has seemingly cost him any shot at reaching 300 wins despite his normal sturdiness. Gallardo had a 10% chance last year and drops to zero thanks to my having almost no confidence that he is a good enough pitcher to accumulate enough wins going forward. And Porcello remains essentially a 5th starter who just happened to matriculate to the majors at the tender age of 20. I can see him having a career similar to Buehrle’s; long tenures of near .500 record. In fact, ironically Porcello’s 162-game average W/L record is identical (14-11) to Buehrle’s … which is also identical to Bumgarner and very close to Cahill’s. I think there’s something clearly “accumulator” in nature to all these guys.

What has happened to some of the candidates from last year not mentioned yet?

Roy Halladay went from a near Cy Young season in 2011 to retirement in just two short seasons. Shoulder injuries are a killer. He retires with 203 wins.

Chad Billingsley lost nearly the entire 2013 season to injury, scuttling what dim chances he had. He’s now not even guaranteed a spot in LA’s high powered rotation.

A bunch of veterans who already had little chance (but were mentioned anyways) have now retired: Jamie Moyer, Livan Hernandez, Andy Pettitte, and Kevin Millwood.

Tim Hudson is an interesting case; he sits at 205 wins, lost a chunk of last season to injury but signed on in a pitcher’s park in SF. He’s gotten 17,16 and 16 wins the last three seasons in his mid 30s; can he just continue to get 16-17 win seasons and suddenly be looking at 300 wins by the time he’s 42? Maybe, but he’s going to have to be good these next two seasons.

Thoughts? Do you care about 300 winners like I do, or is it just an anachronism of baseball history that will go the way of 300 strikeouts, 30-wins and hitting .400?

So my dad calls me the other day and immediately exclaims, “What’s wrong with this team?!?”

Today, the season is 57 games old. Two months old. Almost exactly 1/3 old. And the Nationals, the supposed power houses, next-coming-of the 1927 Yankees, the possible 110 win Nationals, are a .500 team. Actually, a game under .500 with the weekend series loss to Atlanta.

We’ve talked about the Nats early schedule (as has Tom Boswell recently), chock full of 2012 playoff contenders. But 2013 is a new season and in reality the Nats as of two months in have played the 14th ranked schedule of 30 teams (3 days ago it was 19th ranked … so these rankings move fast). We’ve talked about the injuries, the offense in general, defense, the bench, Drew Storen, Danny Espinosa, and Dan Haren all as contributing factors. A couple of prominent national baseball writers pipped in on 5/31/13 on this topic: Jay Jaffeon si.com and then Rob Neyer on BaseballNation.com, offering some suggestions, possible trades (Ian Kinsler?) and possible call-ups (the obvious Anthony Rendon).

But here’s my scary thought, as proposed to my dad. What if .500 is exactly what this team is?

The 2011 Nationals finished .500. The 2012 Nationals surprised us all and won 98 games. Now the team is back to its 2011 levels. Is it possible that this was always a .500 team for whom everything went perfectly right in 2012? All the stars were in alignment in 2012 in terms of hitting, bench play and coming out parties for guys like Ian Desmond and Bryce Harper and Gio Gonzalez. Now in 2013 are we just seeing all these guys revert to their normal production levels?

Were we just spoiled by the amazing bench production we got last year? Here’s a quick table (stats as of 5/31/13):

player

2012 OPS+

2013 OPS+

Career OPS+

Bernadina

113

34

85

Moore

125

27

90

Lombardozzi

83

55

74

Tracy

112

19

97

In other words, all four primary bench guys outperformed their career OPS+ values (mostly by a 25-30% factor) in 2012, and now all four guys are hitting so far below replacement level as to be drastically hurting the club.

I think the answer to the above questions goes along the following, topic by topic:

No, this is better than a .500 team. The 2013 team is absolutely better than the 2011 team that rallied in September to finish 80-81. The rotation now is leaps and bounds better than the 2011 rotation. The offense (on potential anyway) is better.

This team is by-and-large the exact same team as the 2012 98 win team. You can quibble about the loss of Michael Morse‘s charisma and power versus the fire-starting abilities of Denard Span at the top of the order, but then you also have to acknowledge the runs-saved so far this season by having an additional plus-plus defender in the outfield. Haren versus Edwin Jackson? At least a wash. Bullpen additions and subtractions? Perhaps replacing Burnett, Gorzelanny and Gonzalez with just Zach Duke and Rafael Soriano has weakened the bullpen. Perhaps not, considering Soriano’s pedigree as a closer and its cascading effect on the rest of the bullpen.

The bench over produced in 2012 and is underproducing thus far in 2013, per career averages. A bit of expected regression to the mean should indicate rising bench offensive production from here on out. It almost has to; there’s just no way that these four guys are going to hit THIS badly the rest of the season.

But, the early season damage as been done. At this point, just for the team to match its 2012 win total they’d have to finish the season 70-35. That’s a .667 winning percentage. That’s a 110-win pace for a season. The NL Central right now has three teams with better records than either Atlanta or Washington, the two pre-season NL favorites, meaning there may not even be a NL Wild-Card to fall back on. This team needs to focus on winning the division or there may not be an October.

This sounds like something Yogi Berra would say, but here goes: you have to score to win. For me, if they start scoring runs and out-hitting teams, the issues we have with defense, the bullpen and injured starters will become secondary concerns. As we speak, these Nationals are hitting .229 AS A TEAM. That’s unbelievable. Almost amazingly bad. They’re 28th in batting average. They’re dead last in team OBP (on a pace for a modern seasonal low OBP in fact), 27th in team slugging, 29th in wOBA and 28th in wRC+.

They need Werth back in the middle of the order. They need a healthy Harper, who hasn’t been the same since the LA wall crash but really hasn’t been the same since hitting the wall in Atlanta in late April (from a tweet byMark Zuckerman: Bryce Harper’s stats before April 29 collision in ATL: .356/.437/.744. His stats since: .183/.315/.350). They’re finally getting LaRoche back on track, and Zimmerman is hitting well. They need to stop giving at bats to Espinosa, and they need Ramos back to help spell Suzuki (he’s catching nearly every game and his offense has bottomed out in the last month).

I’m going under the assumption, by the way, that Strasburg misses at most one start and that Detwiler returns straight away. I don’t think Nathan Karns is ready for the big time and the team needs to find another spot starter in the short term (Stammen?).

June is here; a weak schedule and an opportunity to get some wins. If we’re still .500 on July 1st, then we’ll probably have run out of excuses and decided that we are who we are.

First we saw what happened to Puerto Rico as a Baseball talent source once it was included as a US territory and made part of the Rule 4 Amateur Draft. In a nutshell; all the US teams closed whatever academies they may have had on the island and cut back on scouts because there was no longer any competitive advantage to being there and developing talent, and thus the number of players from Puerto Rico has drastically fallen as compared to 20 years ago. The best article on this topic i’ve seens is by Jorge Castillo of the New York Times in Jan 2012.

Next we saw the gutting of the Amateur draft compensation limits, along with limits on International free agency spending as ramroaded into the latest CBA. These guidlines were seemingly put in by cheap owners with poor executive staffs who were tired of having the lower payroll teams eat their lunch by spending a few more million dollars on scouting and player development to gain competitive advantages. You know, instead of just having tens of millions of extra dollars handed to them by Regional Sports Networks in large markets (Jerry Reinsdorf, i’m looking at you here, complicit with the notoriosly cheap Bud Selig).

Now this; now we’re hearing that MLB is actually considering putting in place an International draft. A June 1st deadline exists to take action and apparently both sides (the owners and the Players association) seem to be in favor of this draft in some form. MLB is so interested in getting an international draft that they’re willing to give (per Buster Olney) “significant concessions” to the players union (up to and including higher minimum salaries and lowering the time to arbitration) in order to make it happen. The Union’s argument (as it always has been) goes along the following; amateurs and foreigners aren’t union members, so to hell with them. If we can guarantee ourselves more money, lets do it.

Why is this bad?

Simply put, I do not trust MLB executives and the collective penny pinching, revenue hounding ownership-driven management of the sport to put in place the appropriate resources to off-set what is sure to be a massive pull-out of Latin American countries by all 30 teams if an International Draft is put in place. What possible incentives would a team have to develop talent in a place like the Dominican Republic via a privately funded academy, if their rivals could just swoop in and draft them after they’ve been developed for years on end? I feel that an international draft would destroy the pipeline of Latin American talent into the sport, and it would significantly harm the future of Baseball. It would be like Puerto Rico, only on a grand scale for every country south of the Rio Grande.

All so that the owners can save a few million dollars. The average MLB salary last year was $3.2M, or less than most teams now have as budgets for the entire annual Rule 4 draft. Pennies all-told when compared to the typical 9-figure payrolls they maintain and the hundreds of millions of dollars they earn from gate, concessions, parking, merchandise and TV revenues.

I’m not saying the current situation where 16 year olds are signed and then discarded as washed out 19 year olds in America (and left with no English skills, little education and no future) is good. I’m not saying that a system controlled by underworld Buscones is good either. But I have no faith that MLB will take the proper steps and will invest enough money in these countries to offset the impact of a draft. Zero faith; this is after all the same instution that is currently trying to kill pensions for non-uniformed employees!

I don’t entirely understand why the Players Association is for this either; don’t they understand the long term ramifications of these policies? I mean, amateurs aren’t part of the union … but EVERY major league player once was an amateur and faced all these same issues (whether they were subject to the Rule 4 draft or they had to deal with international free agency or had to deal with the Posting system). Are the players so myopic in pursuit of short-term financial gains that they can’t see what the long term effects will be?

Now, the above alarmism being said, there are pretty significant barriers to an international draft. Take for example the situation going on in Mexico. Mexican clubs demand large transfer fees for their players, and nearly every player of any consequence over the age of 13 “belongs” to a club (much like the old Reserve Clause in the majors, only its even MORE restrictive); how would you draft someone who has a price tag associated with them? The issues with the Mexican league are detailed and highlighted in this excellent SportsonEarth.com story by Jorge Arangure Jr about a lawsuit being filed on behalf of a Mexican prospect who is alleging that he’s being tied to a Mexican club via forged documents. Meanwhile a “handshake” deal exists between MLB and the Japanese league preventing MLB teams from signing Japanese players as youths so as to allow them to go through the “posting system,” which enriches clubs in the country. How do you handle Japanese players in the draft? Does the posting fee count against the international FA limit? It clearly doesn’t now, allowing teams to spend tens of millions of dollars just to acquire the rights to negotiate with Japanese FAs (who come from the industrialized and wealthy Japan) but meanwhile FA teenagers from impoverished Latin American countries now face cap limits on bonuses that often times were little more than a few thousand dollars. How is this situation in any way justifiable?

This isn’t Professional Basketball, where professional leagues are now established and are popular the world over and an international draft in the NBA makes sense because player development occurs naturally without the required investment of the US professional league. There’s no summer-long pro baseball in the Dominican Republic or Venezuela where so many of these players come from; there’s barely organized amateur baseball there outside of the academies run by teams. Sure there’s Winter leagues … but are these winter leagues more for returning players from stateside or showcases for local talent?

If you take these Latin American academies away … you will destroy baseball in the country. And you’ll shut down the pipeline of talented players coming to play in America, which will lessen the sport. Is that really what these owners want?

San Francisco Giants starter Randy Johnson acknowledges the crowd after the Giants beat the Washington Nationals 5-1 for his 300th win, in the first game of a baseball doubleheader Thursday, June 4, 2009, in Washington. (AP Photo/Nick Wass)

Despite being much maligned as a method of judging a starting pitcher’s worth, the “Win” is still the essential goal of every starter in the majors and the accumulation of them over a season or career still inspires much thought and discussion. The magical “300 win” threshold remains one of the more challenging career objectives for any starter, and remains an interesting benchmark to discuss. Only 23 pitchers in the history of the game have reached 300 wins.

So, after Randy Johnson‘s reaching the benchmark, and after a number of recent start pitchers also hitting the plateau (Greg Maddux, Roger Clemens and Tom Glavine), are we ever going to see another 300-win pitcher?

Achieving 300 wins in a career is getting more and more difficult. Here’s some interesting stats about reaching 300 wins for a starter in the modern baseball age:

If a pitcher were to enter the major leagues at age 23, he would need to AVERAGE 20 wins for the next 15 years to reach 300 and pitch until age 38.

Put another way, that same pitcher entering at age 23 would have to average 18 wins for 17 seasons to reach 300 by about age 40.

The majors have had ONLY Eleven 20-game winners in total over the past 5 seasons. (Seven of which have come in the last two years, echoing the “rise of the pitcher” and the collapse of the PED slugger era, so perhaps its getting easier to accumulate wins).

5-man rotations mean that starters are averaging 33-34 starts a year, down from the 38-40 starts that Pitchers would get just 20 years ago.

Because of mania over inning counts, specialized relievers, and an obsession with using “closers” in save situations, starters now only earn decisions in around 69% of starts, down from 78.5% of starts in 1972 (source Jay Jaffe‘s article, referenced further down). This means the average pitcher only gets about 24 decisions from their 33-34 starts, making the 20-game winner even that more rare. One can argue that better pitchers get more decisions because they’re more likely to pitch into the 7th and 8th innings, by which time their team should have scored enough runs to win for them. But the fact remains that a lot of wins and losses are in the modern bullpen.

In 2009, just as Randy Johnson won his 300th, I had two long winded discussions (one in April 2009, another in June 2009) an older version of this blog that I maintained with friends about the demise of the 300-game winner. Blog author Jason Amos did a great summary in this posting along with some great links. Now, with another 3 seasons in the books, I thought it might be interesting to see who we were considering as candidates just a few years ago and who might be the next “best” candidates to get to 300 wins. I’ll address candidates and their chances as we present pitchers a number of different ways.

(coincidentally, the 300-game winner spreadsheet I’m using for this post can be found at this link, and in the Links section along the right hand side of this page).

Here’s the current list of active wins leaders post 2012. For brevity’s sake here’s the top 10 (and I’ve included Jamie Moyer as being “active” for the sake of this argument):

Rank

pitcher

age

wins

1

Jamie Moyer

49

269

2

Andy Pettitte

40

245

3

Roy Halladay

35

199

4

CC Sabathia

31

197

5

Tim Hudson

36

197

6

Livan Hernandez

37

178

7

Derek Lowe

39

175

8

Mark Buehrle

33

174

9

Bartolo Colon

39

171

10

Kevin Millwood

37

169

Of this list of top 10 active win leaders, clearly most of them are never going to reach 300 wins. Jamie Moyer has not yet retired at age 49, but the odds of him even making another MLB roster seem thin. Likewise Livan Hernandez and Derek Lowe may struggle to get guaranteed contracts in 2013. Andy Pettitte has returned and pitched effectively for the Yankees this year, but he’s 50+ wins away from the plateau and only seems likely to maybe pitch one more year. Bartolo Colon does have a contract for 2013 but it may be his last season, and Kevin Millwood is just too far away. Tim Hudson, despite his strong performances the last few years, is just too far away at this point as well. The chances of any of these guys to reach 300 wins is 0%.

How about the rest of this top 10 list? Specifically CC Sabathia, Roy Halladay and Mark Buehrle? There’s some intriguing candidates there. Lets look at their chances a slightly different way.

When Randy Johnson hit 300 wins, two Baseball Prospectus authors posted similar posts to this with some interesting analysis. First, Jay Jaffe used a fun little stat he called the Jaffe Blind Optimism method (JABO), which takes a pitcher and assumes he will win 15 games a year until age 42. Well, this incredibly optimistic formula leads us to a new set of more reasonable candidates. I changed the formula slightly and only ran out the 15 wins/year til age 40 and got this list:

Rank

pitcher

age

wins

Jaffe 15wins/yr avg->40

1

CC Sabathia

31

197

332

2

Felix Hernandez

26

98

308

3

Clayton Kershaw

24

61

301

4

Trevor Cahill

24

53

293

5

Justin Verlander

29

124

289

6

Matt Cain

27

85

280

7

Mark Buehrle

33

174

279

8

Yovani Gallardo

26

69

279

9

Chad Billingsley

27

80

275

10

Roy Halladay

35

199

274

By this analysis we see that CC Sabathia looks like a pretty sure bet to hit 300 wins, and for good reason. He’s been healthy, he plays for a team that is constantly winning, and he doesn’t have to pitch like a Cy Young award winner to get wins in New York (21, 19 and 15 wins his last three seasons). He has always been healthy and just needs 5 more solid seasons to be very close to the 300 win plateau. He’s signed through 2016 (with an option for 2017), and there’s no reason to think he’s not going to see that contract through. His elbow-injury scare in the post-season turned out to be innocuous, but we’ll keep an eye on his health status in 2013. If he loses a season or more to injury the chances of his making 300 wins declines precipitously. Felix Hernandez has nearly a 100 career wins at age 26, and also seems like a decent bet to hit 300 wins at this point. But, he’ll need to move to a winning team to make this task easier on himself; he’s only won 13,14 and 13 games the last three seasons because of dreadful run support. He’s signed through 2014 and I’d be surprised if he stays in Seattle (unless they turn that franchise around in the next 3 years).

Clayton Kershaw and (surprisingly) Trevor Cahill appear here by virtue of a lot of early career success (Cahill was an 18 game winner for a bad Oakland team at age 22 in the majors, no small feat). While both have been injury free thus far, it is really difficult to project 24yr olds as staying healthy deep into their 30s. So, we’ll say they’re promising for now but need to get to about 150 wins before we can really start projecting their odds. Yovani Gallardo has quietly been racking up wins as Milwaukee’s “ace,” but is sort of in the same boat as Kershaw and Cahill; he’s only 26, so its hard to see how he’ll sit at age 30. If he’s got another 60-70 wins in four year’s time, we’ll talk.

Justin Verlander‘s 24-win season in 2011, as well as his established status as the “Best Pitcher in Baseball” right now, has launched him into the discussion. The problem is that he “only” has 124 wins entering his age-30 year. He needs to average 18 wins a year for the next decade to have a shot. That’s a tall task, especially considering how well he pitched to just get to 17-8 this year. It isn’t out of the realm of possible, but it is a longshot.

Mark Buehrle and Roy Halladay are both aging workhorses whose chances of reaching the plateau are dimming. Buehrle has just moved to the hyper-competitive AL East and wasn’t exactly dominating to begin with. Meanwhile Halladay’s injury struggles have limited his wins the last couple seasons, likely knocking any chance he had of hitting the plateau. I’ll give them each non-zero chances, but barely non-zero. I’ll give them both the benefit of the doubt because they both seem like the kind of pitchers who could pitch well into their 40s and get the extra wins they’d need to move over the top.

Matt Cain and Chad Billingsley are both mentioned because they had a ton of wins before the age of 25; both in reality are not accumulating wins at the pace they’ll need to stay even close to hitting the 300-win plateau. Plus Billingsley struggled with an injury this year and may be affected next season. Chances right now; slim.

Just for the sake of argument, here’s the next 10 players ranked by the modified Jaffe system:

Rank

pitcher

age

wins

Jaffe 15wins/yr avg->40

11

Zack Greinke

28

91

271

12

David Price

26

61

271

13

Johnny Cueto

26

60

270

14

Gio Gonzalez

26

59

269

15

Carlos Zambrano

31

132

267

16

Jered Weaver

29

102

267

17

Jon Lester

28

85

265

18

Jair Jurrjens

26

53

263

19

Ervin Santana

29

96

261

20

Tim Lincecum

28

79

259

I posted this list because a number of these players were formerly listed as good candidates to hit 300 wins. Specifically, Carlos Zambrano, Jered Weaver, and Tim Lincecum. Zambrano may be out of baseball in 2013, Lincecum may not even be a starter any more, and Weaver, while clearly getting a ton of wins lately needs a slew of 19-20 game winning seasons to catch back up. The collection of 26-yr olds in David Price, Johnny Cueto, and our own Gio Gonzalez are all well behind the paces being set by fellow-aged pitchers Hernandez, Cain and Gallardo, though it isn’t hard to see any of these three post multiple 18-20 win seasons in the coming years.

So, here’s my predictions of the chances by player discussed above (anyone not listed here specifically also sits at 0% chance of making 300 wins):

Name

age

wins

% Chance

CC Sabathia

31

197

90%

Felix Hernandez

26

98

75%

Justin Verlander

29

124

33%

Clayton Kershaw

24

61

25%

Trevor Cahill

24

53

20%

Roy Halladay

35

199

10%

Yovani Gallardo

26

69

10%

Mark Buehrle

33

174

5%

Matt Cain

27

85

5%

Chad Billingsley

27

80

5%

Jamie Moyer

49

269

0%

Andy Pettitte

40

245

0%

Tim Hudson

36

197

0%

Livan Hernandez

37

178

0%

Derek Lowe

39

175

0%

Bartolo Colon

39

171

0%

Kevin Millwood

37

169

0%

Conclusion: I believe we will see another 300-game winner. I think Sabathia has a very good chance of making it, as does Felix Hernandez at this point in his career. But injuries can quickly turn a 300-game career into an “out of baseball by 36″ career, so nothing is set in stone.

This is your semi-weekly/periodic wrap-up of Nats and other baseball news that caught my eye. With the approaching Hall of Fame nonsense, er I mean news cycle approaching, I’ll throw in a HoFame section.

Nationals In General

Transcribed from a radio interview by Tim Dierkes, here’s Mike Rizzoon CF and 1B. This is the first time I’ve seen Rizzo mention NEXT year’s FA class in terms of looking for talent and it makes you wonder if we don’t already have our entire primary starting 15 set (8 out-field players, 5 starters and setup/closer) for 2012. I can live with Jayson Werth in CF, since it opens up lots of FA possibilities in RF. In fact, I smell a separate post coming…

Former Nat Lastings Milledge is going to Japan to try to resurrect his baseball career.

Another Tom Boswell article that I disagree with; he thinks Prince Fielderisn’t “right” for the Nats. I’m sorry; but Fielder is a run creating machine (he created 35 more runs last year than Michael Morse, by way of comparison, which roughly equates with his 5.2 Wins Above replacement value). Yes we have LaRoche who is plus defense, but is he going to come back to 2010’s form or is he going to be a lost cause again? Meanwhile, Fielder looks set to take a shorter term deal and re-try his hand at the FA market when he hits 30. Wouldn’t you sign him for 3yrs $70M? You put Fielder at 1B, keep Morse in Left, groom Bryce Harper to play center and keep Werth in right. For the next 3 years. How difficult is that? Boswell talks about where to put Rendon; well; you put him wherever you have a need. Put him at 2nd and move Espinosa to short. Or you trade someone to free up room. This team’s problem isn’t the need for a lead-off slap hitter; we need a big run producer in the middle of the order. Someone to replace what Adam Dunn gave us for two years.

Ryan Tatusko posts his 2011 recap of his minor league season plus his time in the Venezuelan Winter League. I wish more players were as blogger-friendly as Tatusko.

Hall of Fame Specific

A pro Edgar Martinez take with the important quote, “There is a position called DH…” I have changed my own stance on this issue in recent years, especially when considering relief pitchers as hall of fame worthy. If you argue that a closer and his 60-70 innings is somehow more valuable to a team than a designated hitter’s 650 at bats, then I’d have to disagree. On my hypothetical ballot, Martinez is in.

Excellent review of active MLB players under HoFame consideration by Fangraph’s Dave Cameron. Also, the comments discussion brings up a number of other players. He uses primarily career WAR to determine the player’s value, which I’m somewhat hesitant about (in most cases WAR is an accumulator stat, as a mediocre player who stayed very healthy will have a higher WAR than an excellent but shorter-lived career).

This article really got to me, to the point where I commented on both the original post by Jay Jaffe at Baseball Prospectus and the discussion at TangoTiger‘s InsideTheBook.com blog. Jaffe’s hall of fame measuring system (called JAWS) somehow has determined that Brad Radke, the middling pitcher for the Twins who had basically one standout season in his career, was a BETTER player career-wise than Jack Morris. How would any sane baseball observer possibly come to this conclusion? This is where the modern blogger’s over-reliance on statistics really gets to me. I have not read into why this system ranks Radke so high while ranking Morris so low but suspect it is due to a reliance on the same calculations that go into the ERA+ statistic (of which Radke’s career ERA+ of113 is better than Nolan Ryan‘s career era of 112).

Free Agents/Player Transaction News

Oakland continues to dismantle itself: Boston trades OF prospectJosh Reddick and two other players to Oakland for closer Andrew Bailey and outfielder Ryan Sweeney. This is after Boston acquired Mark Melancon earlier in the off-season; they now have completely remade the back side of their rotation. Clearly the team is moving Daniel Bard to the rotation, having just traded for his replacement. Reddick was clearly seen as surplus to requirements, despite putting together a decent 2011 season, but you have to wonder if the team is going to be satisfied with Sweeney starting in RF.

Keith Law makes a good point during his analysis of the Bailey move, saying that adding Bailey is a far better move than paying Jonathan Papelbon $50M. I agree completely and think that anyone who pays $10M+ per year for a guy who throws 70 innings and who only really has about 50% “high leverage” plate appearances (see last year’s splits for Mariano Rivera and Papelbon to see that 57% of Rivera’s plate appearances were in “high” leverage situations as a high, while Papelbon was at 47%) is just wasting money. Find a hard thrower in your organization (say, like Drew Storen for the Nats), install him as the closer as a rookie, then ride him til free agency and then cut him loose and start over. Relievers are fungible talents, they come and go, mostly are failed starters since they don’t need the full repertoire of pitches to be successful, and are cheaper to come by.

(hat tip to ck of the Nats Enquirer): The Baltimore Sun reports that Scott Boras and Prince Fielder were in the Baltimore/DC area to meet with an owner not named Peter Angelos. More links on the topic from Federal Baseball. Gee, I wonder who it could be? Why would those two fly HERE and not directly to the city of the owner in question, unless the owner of the team in question was either a) the Nationals, or b) an owner of a MLB team who lives in this area but owns a team based elsewhere, or c) an owner of another team just happened to be in DC for some odd reason (odd because Congress is out of session, which would seem to eliminate most any possibly lobbying reason). Don’t get me wrong; I think Adam LaRoche can contribute in 2012 and it seems ludicrous to think he can’t at least get close to his 2010 numbers, but Fielder is a 5+ WAR player who probably makes us the favorite for the NL wild card if we sign him, right now.

General Baseball News

Wow, two LOOGY articles in the same day. Bill James answered a question about the evolution of the LOOGY and posted this link describing its birth (apparently by Tony LaRussa in the 1991 season). I also never knew that the term “LOOGY” was coined by none other than Rob Neyer. And TangoTiger points to some of the same research. Mid 30s lefties everywhere have LaRussa to thank for their extended careers.

Could you imagine this happening in today’s game? The first intentional pitch would have resulted in ejections. Certainly modern umpires would not let a pitcher throw pitch after pitch at an opposing batter. Clearly these umpires let this game get out of hand.

Will MLB step in? USAToday’s Seth Livingston thinks that the Oakland payroll dumping trades this off-season may get the attention of the front office. Hard to see why; according to Cot’s the Athletics are only signed up for around $17M of guaranteed contracts in 2012 right now, before a slew of arbitration cases. They non-tendered 3 of their 10 arbitration cases but kept a couple of their more expensive guys (Cot’s thinks they had 14 arbitration-eligible players; I havn’t cross-referenced outrights and DFAs but know they had 10 arb tender decisions). Of those they did tender, they have since traded away Sweeney, Gonzalez, Bailey, Breslow and Cahill. Geeze. Baseball-Reference thinks they’ll get to $50M in payroll; I wonder if they’ll get to $35m frankly. And, its looking more and more like this could be something like a 50-win team. Things could get ugly in the Bay area in 2012.

This would be a loss for us prospect hounds: Keith Law is reportedly interviewing for a front-office position with the Houston Astros. Law takes a very specific, opinionated viewpoint towards player development, drawing from his experiences in the Toronto organization (which itself during his time took a rather college-heavy approach to the draft which ultimately wasn’t as successful as the team wanted, ultimately contributing to the end of JP Ricciardi‘s reign.

An interesting exercise; USA Today builds an unbeatable MLB team for the median MLB payroll. Honestly though, I’m not sure just how challenging this exercise is. If you gave me $86M (the median payroll they used) you should be able to put together TWO such teams. There’s enough pre-arbitration and arbitration-controlled talent in the league to be able to do the same task for something approaching a $20M payroll. A future blog post?

Follow-up on Alex Rodriguez‘s experimental Germany treatment; this op-ed piece from Jeff Passan on the blurry line between PEDs and legitimate surgical procedures. The article has a very in-depth description of the A-Rod procedure and raises the question as to what defines a Performance Enhancing Drug? I have had similar discussions; why are Steroids “bad” but Cortisone “good” in terms of usage? What do Cortisone shots do? They enable a player to play through pain that otherwise may keep him out. Uh … isn’t that the definition of a “performance enhancing” substance?? Steroid’s aren’t illegal; they’re just controlled. But so is cortisone; you can’t just inject yourself with the stuff without a doctor’s order. Passan takes things one step further, comparing the healing effects of HGH with these new treatments that A-Rod and Bartolo Colon got and makes a very good point; the WADA uses 3 categories to define a doping drug and everything we’ve described here can be argued to fit those criteria (except that only HGH and Steroids have been determined to be “bad” by the powers that be). There’s something inconsistent here.

Collegiate/Prospect News

Seedling to the Star’s scouting report on Braves phenom prospect Julio Teheran. Teheran’s stock has slipped somewhat in the past two years, especially given the inevitable comparisons to fellow pitching prospect phenom Matt Moore. While Moore’s 2011 MLB debut was nothing short of amazing (including his 7 innings of shutout ball in the playoffs), Teheran posted a 5.03 ERA in about 20 MLB innings throughout 2011. It was bad enough to probably rule Teheran out of the 2012 rotation plans and send him back to repeat AAA. But if he can put things together, he’ll join an arsenal of young arms in Atlanta that seems set to be their next wave of starters in the ilk of John Smoltz and Tom Glavine.

General News; other

Baseball meets modern America: Joe Maddon and the rising Latino population in his home town of Hazelton, PA, as written by Joe Posnanski.

67-56? I’ve never seen a football game with such a ridiculous scoring line.